At this point I don't have much to add, but on my first quick read the author's usage of ἐν At the beginning of verse 16 and in verse 24 stood out to me. It is not necessarily what I would expect to see.

Wes Wood wrote:At this point I don't have much to add, but on my first quick read the author's usage of ἐν At the beginning of verse 16 and in verse 24 stood out to me. It is not necessarily what I would expect to see.

Yeah, I find the this preposition in Gal 1:24 καὶ ἐδόξαζον ἐν ἐμοὶ τὸν θεόν to be especially difficult.

Wes Wood wrote:At this point I don't have much to add, but on my first quick read the author's usage of ἐν At the beginning of verse 16 and in verse 24 stood out to me. It is not necessarily what I would expect to see.

Yeah, I find the this preposition in Gal 1:24 καὶ ἐδόξαζον ἐν ἐμοὶ τὸν θεόν to be especially difficult.

I take "εν εμοι" in these two cases to simply mean "by me as an agent of some sort":
"αποκαλυψαι τον υιον αυτου εν εμοι" = "to reveal his son by me" which implies "I am an agent used by God to reveal his son"
"και εδοξαζον εν εμοι τον θεον" = "and they glorified God by me" which implies "They glorified God by accepting me"

Wes Wood wrote:At this point I don't have much to add, but on my first quick read the author's usage of ἐν At the beginning of verse 16 and in verse 24 stood out to me. It is not necessarily what I would expect to see.

Louw and Nida has 21 semantic domains for ἐν.

In verse 16 what makes most sense in the context is m to (experiencer): #90.56 he revealed his son to me.

In verse 24 I would choose k with regard to (specification): #89.5 they praised God with respect to me or possibly q because (reason): 89.26 they praised God because of me (i.e. what happened to me).

89.5 markers of an area of activity which bears some relation to something else - ‘in, about, in the case of, with regard to
89.26 markers of cause or reason, with focus upon instrumentality, either of objects or events - ‘because of, on account of, by reason of.
90.56 a marker of an experiencer of an event - ‘in relation to, with respect to, to.’

Wes Wood wrote:At this point I don't have much to add, but on my first quick read the author's usage of ἐν At the beginning of verse 16 and in verse 24 stood out to me. It is not necessarily what I would expect to see.

Louw and Nida has 21 semantic domains for ἐν.

In verse 16 what makes most sense in the context is m to (experiencer): #90.56 he revealed his son to me.

In verse 24 I would choose k with regard to (specification): #89.5 they praised God with respect to me or possibly q because (reason): 89.26 they praised God because of me (i.e. what happened to me).

89.5 markers of an area of activity which bears some relation to something else - ‘in, about, in the case of, with regard to
89.26 markers of cause or reason, with focus upon instrumentality, either of objects or events - ‘because of, on account of, by reason of.
90.56 a marker of an experiencer of an event - ‘in relation to, with respect to, to.’

Iver, I'd agree on verse 24 but why do you take verse 16 with that particular sense that you propose? Do you have any examples of "εν" functioning with that sense? My reason for taking it the way I did was because "εν" is easily read to denote an (indirect) agent, which I think fits the context much better because that is precisely what the writer is trying to prove, that he is an agent of God in announcing the glad tidings to the nations.

David Lim wrote:My reason for taking it the way I did was because "εν" is easily read to denote an (indirect) agent.

If Paul wrote διά instead, we'd have no problem with this interpretation, but that's not really what ἐν means. There's an instrumental sense, sure, but an agent sense is fairly unusual and not "easily read" at all. Indeed BDAG (s.v. ἐν 6) glossses that sense as "with the help of," which does not apply to this verse. For Gal 1:24 specifically, BDAG suggests "in my case," "because of me," or "for me" instead. The difficulty is that none of these proposals (including yours) fall under the most prototypical sense(s) of ἐν and so we are left to determine the least poor fit among the possible peripheral senses of this preposition.

My take on καὶ ἐδόξαζον ἐν ἐμοὶ τὸν θεόν is that ἐν ἐμοί is doing the work of an ethical dative / dative of reference (cf. Iver's choice of the specification sense, BDAG's preferred "in my case"), but that the ordinary bare dative μοι for this sense would be ambiguous with (or even blocked by) this speech act verb as an experiencer. So the dative preposition ἐν was used instead to avoid the meaning that they were praising God (directly) to Paul.

David Lim wrote:My reason for taking it the way I did was because "εν" is easily read to denote an (indirect) agent.

If Paul wrote διά instead, we'd have no problem with this interpretation, but that's not really what ἐν means. There's an instrumental sense, sure, but an agent sense is fairly unusual and not "easily read" at all. Indeed BDAG (s.v. ἐν 6) glossses that sense as "with the help of," which does not apply to this verse. For Gal 1:24 specifically, BDAG suggests "in my case," "because of me," or "for me" instead. The difficulty is that none of these proposals (including yours) fall under the most prototypical sense(s) of ἐν and so we are left to determine the least poor fit among the possible peripheral senses of this preposition.

I was referring to verse 16, not 24. In verse 24 it is, as you say, probable that "εν" means something like "in the case of" / "with respect to", which is why I did agree with Iver. I realize that I didn't retract what I said earlier; I no longer thought that "εν" implies an indirect agent in verse 24.